I am proud to announce that Evergage has been named a “Strong Performer” in “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2017” report. Drawing from an initial field of 117 technology providers, as identified in Forrester’s Feb. 17, 2017 “Vendor Landscape: Digital Intelligence Technology Providers You Should Care About” report, Forrester identified the 10 most significant companies in the digital intelligence category for this Wave, based on a set of inclusion criteria. Those companies were then evaluated against 26 criteria in the Wave report. Evergage received the highest score in the digital intelligence user experience criterion and had among the highest scores in the digital engagement optimization and supporting services criteria.

I was very impressed with Forrester’s rigorous methodology for this report. Research was undertaken in the form of an extensive survey, product demos, and interviews with several clients. With all the research that was done to distill so much information into a brief report, we at Evergage are very pleased with the quality of the analysis conducted of the top Digital Intelligence (DI) platform providers and our position among them.

I want to summarize some of my main takeaways from the report, but I encourage you to download the report and read it on your own as well.

What is a Digital Intelligence Platform

Forrester defines DI as “the practice of developing a holistic understanding of customers across digital touchpoints for the purposes of optimizing and perfecting the experiences delivered and decisions made by brands during moments of engagement.”

Forrester defines three tiers of a complete DI platform:

Digital data management: collecting and managing digital customer data and merging it with other important customer data

Digital analytics: generating insights from the data

Digital engagement optimization: using the insights and data from the previous tiers to continuously optimize customer experiences

What does that mean? To create digital experiences where you treat each person as an individual, you need to track data natively, then take in data from other systems, aggregate that data, interpret it with machine learning, deliver insights that can be acted on in real time, affect experiences, and continuously optimize. That’s what DI is, and that is what Evergage was designed to do from the beginning.

Evergage vs. Others

Most solutions on the market were not designed to accomplish all three of the DI tiers from the beginning. There are four approaches to building a complete Digital Intelligence Platform.

Acquire and Piece Together. Other vendors require many products to deliver their DI capabilities. Many in the DI space have leveraged acquisitions to accumulate all of their capabilities. As we all know, with technology acquisitions, it’s not guaranteed that all acquired pieces will play nicely together or respond in real time.

Begin with Digital Engagement Optimization. Some vendors begin with A/B testing or basic targeting and then look to add deep digital data management and analytics. These solutions lack depth and the ability to integrate with other systems. They tend to be basic personalization or testing tools, point solutions, and islands.

Begin with Data Analytics. Other vendors begin as customer data or data analytics solutions that then look to add digital engagement functionality. These solutions tend not to personalize experiences in real time since their original data architecture was built for analysis, not for true real-time (i.e. <20ms) response.

Unified, Purpose-Built, Digital Intelligence Platform. Evergage has only one platform to deliver our DI capabilities. We built it to accomplish the Digital Intelligence use case as Forrester defines it: “the practice of developing a holistic understanding of customers across digital touchpoints for the purposes of optimizing and perfecting the experiences delivered and decisions made by brands during moments of engagement.”

It’s important to note that while three products are cited in the report, Evergage Core is the same solution as Evergage 1, minus some functionality for clients that don’t need the whole platform. And Evergage for Mobile Apps is an add-on module that still operates within the Evergage platform. So Evergage is truly one platform designed to accomplish all three tiers of digital intelligence.

Platform Approach > Point Solutions

Forrester identified 15 different DI capabilities from data warehousing to behavioral targeting and recommendations. Forrester notes that in the initial “Vendor Landscape: Digital Intelligence Technology Providers You Should Care About” report, the majority of recognized companies offered at least 3 of those 15 capabilities.

In this Wave report on the top vendors, the average number of capabilities among the vendors jumped to 11.5 out of 15. Also, the Wave participants deliver capabilities in all three DI tiers and provide more complete coverage of the stack. Forrester says, “the habit of piecemeal purchasing of digital analytics and optimization technologies in isolation for use by different teams (e.g., marketing, product management, and customer support) stymies attempts to track and keep up with the customer at scale across all digital touchpoints. Enterprises and their vendors are now starting the move toward consolidated technology platforms.”

Point solutions that offer pieces of the overall story are too hard to manage and won’t allow you to completely understand your customers across channels to optimize their experiences with your company. With the Evergage platform that provides all three tiers of DI (from collecting and managing the data, generating insights, and acting on them to create better experiences), you can provide relevant experiences at the 1:1 level in real time. Better experiences for individuals means increased conversions and improved loyalty for your company.

Final Thoughts

Evergage is proud to be named a “Strong Performer” by Forrester. We think this report is validation that our strategy is on the right track, and we commend a leading global research and advisory firm for their thorough evaluation.

To learn more about the top digital intelligence platforms and Evergage’s position among them, download the Forrester report.